I’m really amazed at what is happening with the political discourse in the United States. Let me start out by telling you that I have been a Socialist for over two decades.

I didn’t start out being a Socialist in fact, I was a Democrat and a staunch Democratic at that. My mother told me all about FDR and the depression, my father fought the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. In fact, I retired from the United States Army after 20 years of service.

During the election when Al Gore and George Bush ran against each other, I started to think that maybe this political system we have in the United States was just a little bit off. When the Supreme Court stopped the recount, and declare George Bush the winner, I started really paying attention to politics. The things the Bush administration did, and the war in Iraq, made me start to question everything that I read, and everything that was happening.

I noticed that the Democrats seemed to go along with everything that the Bush administration proposed. They talked a good deal about their opposition for the press, but when the votes came out in the Congress and the Senate, there wasn’t really any opposition at all.

Today, with Donald Trump as president, the people who used to think of themselves as Democrats are starting to understand that the party that they belong to isn’t much different than the party they oppose. The so-called “journalists” on television and those that write for newspapers and magazines seem to toe the party line. Many independent journalists are starting to write that the Democratic Party is a corporate party, and that they work for corporate America and the billionaire class.

I can’t believe that it took this long for Americans to understand the fact that the media and the two political parties in this nation have been compromised by corporations. It isn’t only for like billionaires that run these corporations that are threat to our society, but it is also to the people in Washington who really wield the power behind what the federal government. What I’m talking about is what they now refer to as “the Deep state”. These people “that make up the Deep state” “can’t really be identified. These people are largely unelected, and many are federal employees that have worked in the State Department and the intelligence agencies and former government office holders and Washington insiders that work for think tanks like the center for foreign relations and many other organizations.

These people, because they have working in the halls of power in Washington DC for years, have more power than some of our elected representatives. In fact, many of them have more power than almost all our elected representatives. They also have deep connections to corporations and lobbyists, and to the Defense Department. Because they have served so long in the federal government, Congressman and Senators along with people in the administration rely on them because they know the workings of the government and they also know what can be said and done, and how they should go about completing the things that they want to do, but conversely, they also know how to sabotage the things they don’t want done.

They also know what bills are going to pass, when they are introduced, and when they will be voted on. This is tremendous inside knowledge to be passed to Senators and congressmen before their staffs even have a handle on these things. This inside knowledge can be used in the stock market and other areas to make people tremendously wealthy. This is an example; every member of the Senate is a millionaire. This list also includes the Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. I bet that shock some people.

Have you ever noticed that Bernie Sanders the great “progressive” has never said anything about the defense budget of the United States? For some people reading this, it may come as a shock that America spends 54% of its discretionary spending on defense. We spend as much on defense in the present day as we did during the height of World War II adjusting for inflation.

Bernie Sanders constantly rails that we should have Medicare for all and that our healthcare system should be based on single-payer. He also says that state run colleges and universities should be tuition free. He also decries the way our veterans are treated and how our infrastructure is crumbling.

Healthcare only amounts to about 10% of the budget. There are people who claim that tuition free universities and colleges could cost upwards of $10 billion over 10 years. Defense spending in the United States, without additional funds appropriated by Congress for special emergencies, and black operations, amounted to $598 billion. 10% of that amount would be almost $60 billion. That would be enough to pay for the healthcare of the American people, provide tuition free universities in state run universities and colleges, and fix our crumbling infrastructure and provide jobs the thousands of Americans.

Before anyone is up in arms about cutting our defense budget, and starts screaming that it would open the United States to foreign invasion, we must really seriously take a sober look at how much we spend compared other nations on defense. The fact is, we spend more on defense than the next 14 countries combined.Why is that? Is it because we are afraid of the Russian Federation? The Russian Federation has a GDP lower than South Korea. South Korea also spends more on defense than the Russian Federation.

So, who or what, is United States so afraid of? The answer is that United States is not afraid of anyone militarily. The fact is that the military-industrial complex is firmly entrenched in every state in America. Every Congressman and every Sen. has a stake in defense contractors employing people in their state. This didn’t happen by chance, it was designed to be this way. This is what Pres. Dwight David Eisenhower warned us about his farewell speech.

I think that Bernie Sanders doesn’t mention the fact that we spend 54% of our budget on the military and defense associated projects because the last president that mentioned this, was killed in Dallas in 1963. Other people who have mentioned how our bloated military-industrial complex takes money away from the citizens include Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy. There than others, but anyone with any power that mentions this is murdered.

There is no hope for the Democratic Party. In fact, there is no hope for our system of capitalism. Capitalism is in its death throes, and nothing can change that fact. The cycle of boom and bust is going on for so long that now, the bust will be so large as to take down the entire system. We produce more than we can consume. In fact, the entire world produces more than people with money can consume. The economists know this and so did the politicians. We can’t take down the military-industrial complex through our elected officials. There must be mass movement that demands that the United States reform its policies and decrease the money that we spend to promote war and havoc in the rest of the world.

Bernie Sanders, or a “reformed” Democratic Party is not going to get us out this predicament. The only way that we can possibly stop the billionaire class and the banks and investment houses from extracting the wealth of the United States for their personal gain is to wreck so much havoc that the government must bend to the People’s will. My advice to the American people is not to get sidetracked by Republican versus Democrat or fixing the Democratic Party, my advice is to work with each other and the trade unions to promote general strikes and boycotts and demonstrations until the government cannot function until reforms are implemented. If we cannot get the government to implement reforms, then we must go back to the Declaration of Independence:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”